Right here’s an idea for an interesting campaign. It’s not quite canon, as it links two unrelated elements of the canon into one whole, but see what you think:-
The Ordo Chronos
The Ordo Chronos is one of the most mysterious and secretive of the Lesser Ordos Inquisitorial. Ostensibly concerned with resolving temporal paradoxes (such as warp vessels that arrive within the Imperium from the future or far past) the Inquisitors of this closed order in fact struggle to foresee and avert massive disasters threatening the stability of the entire Imperium by operating and maintaining the mysterious “Imperial Tarot.”
Imperial Divination
The Imperium has no perfectly reliable means of predicting the future. Unlike the Farseers of the ancient Eldar race, human psykers lack the nuanced intellect required to tease apart the many strands of fate hinted at by the motion of warp energies. Whilst there are diviners, seers and prognosticators aplenty within the Imperium, most are either frauds or madmen. Those vanishingly rare few human psykers who possess an instinctive affinity for divination find that their talents tend to operate only within limited parameters, such as identifying massive threats to themselves or other small regions within the Imperium. Such diffuse and vague predictions do not provide the Imperium as a whole with a sufficient notice of impending danger to respond effectively.
The Imperial Tarot
The Imperial Tarot is the most widespread and tacitly accepted method of divination within the Imperium. At its basest form it consists of a pack of paper cards of a number of suits that are used in certain key assays by those who purport to read the future. In the hands of non-psykers, they are effectively useless. In the hands of psykers, these cards can be used as a focus for existing divination psychic abilities, though these abilities are manifested solely through the psyker, not through the cards themselves.
However, in its purest form, the Tarot consists of psychically impregnated crystalline matrix cards bound to a specially trained user who is capable of attuning himself to both the cards and the flow of the warp. Specifically, Tarot users are trained to attune themselves to specific essences (describing the flow of the warp is impossible to non-psykers, but perhaps “frequencies” is a useful, though imperfect analogy) within the warp.
The users of the Tarot hold the belief that the Emperor himself generates these “frequencies,” warning his beloved subjects of perils ahead. In fact, the truth is far more complex.
The Impossible Journey
The Ordo Chronos, for thousands of years, has secretly sought to supplant the vague prognostications of mad prophets by providing the High Lords with a clear-sighted view of the harsh future. They have approached this difficult task by setting themselves an ostensibly impossible objective. They seek to travel through time, to the future, and report their findings back to the present.
The Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus, were they aware of such a scheme, would be quick to raise technical objections highlighting the folly of such hubris. The Imperium possesses no time travel technology. And yet the Ordo Chronos have correctly identified that the Imperium does in fact possess technology that can be used to effect time travel: stasis fields.
Stasis Fields
Stasis fields are a one way ticket to the future. Manufactured on a diminishing number of Imperial Forge worlds, including Belacane and Mars, these impossibly arcane devices are poorly understood (if at all) by the Magi who operate them. When operated, they freeze time within their sphere of operations, suspending everything within the field like an insect locked in amber.
An Imperial agent enclosed within a stasis field is immune to the passage of time. If sufficient power is provided to the field generator, it can run indefinitely.
The Longest Watch
For thousands of years, the Ordo Chronos has used stasis fields to send its acolytes on secret missions into the future.
The mysterious founders of the Ordos used the incredible powers of the Inquisitorial Rosette to set up a vast network of stasis chambers concealed beneath major Imperial worlds. These immense, dusty chambers, concealed beneath miles of enclosed tunnel ways, contain utterly stable plasma reactors capable, if necessary, of running for hundreds of thousands of years.
Every few decades, a mysterious Inquisitor from the dark past of the Imperium will emerge from one of these chambers with an entourage of acolytes of all kinds, and embark upon a covert assessment of the Imperium of that time.
The Blind Bond
Crucial to the success of every mission into the far future conducted by the Ordo Chronos are the Farspeakers.
Farspeakers are uniquely talented Astropaths. It is rare for those to be born who possess the strength of will and psychic talent to make good Astropaths. It is rarer still for psychic abilities to manifest with predictable regularity within the same familial bloodline. And it is almost unheard of for twin siblings to be born who become Astropaths at the same time. And yet, in an Imperium of uncounted trillions, such births do occasionally occur.
Twin Astropaths are known throughout the Adeptus Astra Telepathica as being the most adept and potent of all means of message transmission. Those who are born together, trained together, and ultimately blinded together share a sublime psychic bond, and are capable of sending messages instantly between themselves, though they may actually be a galaxy apart.
The Ordo Chronos have discovered that this psychic bond is so pure that it transcends time itself, through the vagaries of the fickle warp. If one sibling is placed within a stasis chamber for a thousand years, when he is released, he is capable of transmitting through time to his long dead brother…and of receiving a reply.
This link is imperfect. Despite the intense bond between Farspeakers, messages sent in this way are more prone than normal to interference from warp entities, and particularly prone to Astropathic transmission phenomena known as time dilated echoing, which can render messages into unintelligible gibberish.
However, through the use of stasis fields and Farspeakers, it is possible-to a limited degree- for the Ordo Chronos to predict the future.
The Voice of Doom
The Ordo Chronos disseminate their message by connecting the tiny number of active Farspeakers directly to the arcane mechanism of the Golden Throne. Using this immensely powerful psychic transmission device, they are able to provide a rough and ready indication to the wider Imperium as to future threats. These subjective impressions of the future, garnered from the Farspeaker twin in the far future, are transmitted across the breadth of the Astronomicon’s range, and are picked up by those who possess the means to accurately read the Imperial Tarot.
The system is not perfect. Indeed, it is far from perfect. Major events affecting billions are understandably prioritised by the Farspeakers of the future, and their desire to impress upon the people of the past the danger they face can result in overly emotive, doom-laden and forbidding predictions that are too diffuse to respond to effectively. For example, the approach of the Tyranid Hive Fleets appears to have been predicted by the Imperial Tarot, though the impressions of imminent horror and terror generated by the Farpeakers were so widespread that they led to a wave of mass suicides among psychically sensitive Tarot readers that precluded coherent responsive action. It took the actions of an Inquisitor from another Ordos, Kryptman, to bring the specific details of the Tyranid threat to the wider Imperium.
Furthermore, the Golden Throne itself occasionally appears to interfere with the operation of the transmission of the Farspeaker’s messages: sometimes it appears that individual regions are targeted for unusual divinitive transmissions by the Golden Throne. Some awestruck Farspeakers have asserted that this is evidence of the Emperor himself sending messages to his faithful, though others argue thatthis is evidence of the incomprehensibly complex machinery of the Throne gradually decaying and malfunctioning. Evidence of these messages has been brutally suppressed since news of their existence led to the Moriae Schism within the ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Walking in the Far Future
Those who accompany their Ordo Chronos Inquisitor masters on their one-way journeys into the darker future of the Imperium literally have no idea what to expect. History has shown that entire sectors can fall overnight, or be wiped out by supernovae. When the stasis field drops, they might find themselves in the cold vacuum of space or in the heart of a star rather than the anticipated dank chamber of an ancient stasis chamber.
Their missions are diverse and fraught. Sometimes these agents are required to spy upon key figures within the Imperial hierarchy. Sometimes they must obtain information regarding some new threat or terror facing humanity unknown to ages past. Sometimes they must assassinate a harmless individual who has been identified by those travelling even further ahead as one who is likely to father a great heretic or monster.
Ordo Chronos acolytes must operate in a future totally unknown to them: all local knowledge is useless, as it is effectively ancient history. Contacts and allies are long dead, as are friends and family. Such acolytes are effectively in hostile territory, operating in secret within the Imperium to obtain crucial information that can be transmitted back to those long-dead, in the perhaps doomed hope of altering their new present for the better.
They work under the direct supervision of an individual (their Inquisitor) who may have made dozens of such leaps of faith into the future, and who is likely a ruthless and shadowy manipulator of the Imperium’s history from ages past.
Anyway, there we go…Partly Canon, mostly not, this idea links the Ordo Chronos with the Imperial Tarot, introduces a new element (Farspeakers) that allows productive one-way time travel, and provides a few ideas for a (hopefully) interesting alternative campaign. Hope you like it!
